The Stripling

12 year old Zack Sheridan’s family is brutally murdered in 1878 Montana by psychopathic brothers. Zack and his 5 year-old sister Annie embark on a desperate 700 mile escape through a rugged, beautiful, and dangerous land to find their uncle in Colorado. This is a trip of learning, vengence, loyalty, and discovery begun by a boy and completed by a man. His mother’s locket holds a cryptic poem. More

Twelve year-old Zack Sheridan’s family is brutally murdered by a psychopathic self-appointed lawman and his sons. Zack`s mother, as she lay dying, exacts a promise from him to escape the killers and take his five year-old sister Annie to their only surviving relative, his dad’s long estranged brother, Cooper, in Colorado. With her last breath, saying, “This is who you are,” she hands him a valued locket that may hold more than it appears.Keeping his promise, and using the woodcraft taught to him by his mentor, Nokosi, a Civil War veteran who had died with the family, Zack and Annie begin a desperate travail of some seven hundred miles through a rugged, beautiful, and dangerous land to find their uncle.The year is 1878. The land between northern Montana and Colorado is largely unsettled. Policed by scattered army patrols trying to deal with a combination of arriving settlers, unhappy Indians, and murdering outlaws, the land is anything but safe for Zack and Annie. And too, Mother Nature, in spite of her coquettish nature, can have a dark side…This is more than a seven hundred mile horseback ride. It is a trip begun by a boy and completed by a man in the making. This is about personal growth, love, loyalty, and vengeance playing out against a backdrop of forgone but not forgotten romance.So read on. Hunker down over a small fire in a blizzard, swim for your life across a raging river, be on the lookout for bears and bad guys, and above all, know how to use a gun. Enjoy.

Walter G Pigeon is a born and bred Albertan who cut his teeth on the comic books his father would bring home for him each payday. It is fair to suggest that the likes of Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, and Tarzan all had a hand in developing his imagination and fostering the desire to write. As a youth he earned the rank of Queen’s Scout and learned much about the natural world from his father, an outdoorsman in his own right. Throughout his career as a corporate security professional, he has been engaged in diverse writing projects touching on security, corporate communications, software, and magazine articles. He has a timber cabin in the hills of western Alberta where he enjoys thinking, writing, designing, working, and nuzzling at the bosom of Mother Nature. He is a Certified Protection Professional, a Certified Fraud Examiner, and a member of Mensa. He is also a member of the Writers Guild of Alberta and the Canadian Authors Association. He may be contacted through his website, http://www.waltergpigeon.com/ where access to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn may be found.

Reviews

Review by:
Cherime MacFarlane
on March 23, 2013 :
Great story. Read far longer than I had planned to last night. Thanks for a great read. Only tiny little complaint is the formatting at the beginning where it seems each chapter of the book has a blank page. One could think that the book is empty of content. I just kept on moving pages and finally got to the story. It was great from there.